May 2, 2017

Despots Are Us

Ad-lib interviews:  After excoriating the press for the first fifteen minutes of his 100 day speech, Trump sat for interviews with as many press outlets as he could fit into his schedule. At some point he stopped having fun so he walked out of an interview with Face the Nation’s John Dickerson when asked about his allegation that he had been wiretapped by Obama. He wouldn’t back off his previous statements that Obama was “sick and bad” and he stuck with his false wiretapping claims, the ones that he insists everyone knows are true except for FBI Director Comey and NSA Director Rogers who will be testifying this week at a closed House Intelligence Committee hearing looking into Russia election interference and possible Trump team collusion.    

Andrew Jackson Love:  Trump spent part of an interview with the Washington Times extolling Andrew Jackson, his favorite president.  Jackson, like Trump was an impulsive populist.  He was also a slave owner who fought over 100 duels. He was President from 1829 to 1837 and died in 1845.  For some reason Trump went off on a tangent during the interview insisting that his hero Jackson was angry about the way that Abraham Lincoln handled the events leading up to the Civil War, adding that if Lincoln had only listened to Jackson, the Civil War would have been avoided.  Trump seemed not to know that Jackson died sixteen years before the Civil War took place until later in the day when he noticed he was being ridiculed on Twitter and on the evening cable shows.  He then tried to clarify his remarks by tweeting that the clairvoyant Jackson had anticipated the Civil War and would have found a way to avoid it if he’d been alive. 

Duterte Invite:  Fallout from human rights activists and several Senators about Trump’s impromptu and inappropriate invitation to Philippine President Duterte escalated during the day leaving the White House searching for a rationale for Trump’s Duterte affinity, something other than Trump Tower Manila.  Hapless Press Secretary Spicer insisted that Trump’s invitation could be justified because the Philippines are an important ally against North Korean aggression despite the fact that the Philippines have little if any strategic value when it comes to North Korea.  It turns out, Duterte, who has been cozying up to China, isn’t all that excited to visit Washington anyway.  He responded to the invitation by saying that he may have other plans that day, possibly another murderous purge.

                     

Despot Week:  Apparently this is Be Nice to Despots week in Trump America. In another interview, this one with Bloomberg News, Trump called North Korea’s Kim Jong-un a smart cookie and added that he would be honored to sit down with him, forgetting that just last week he sent Secretary of State Tillerson to the UN to press member countries to further isolate Kim and North Korea.  Kim hasn’t met with any world leaders, he hasn’t even met China’s President Xi so he’s probably not hopping on a plane to Washington, DC anytime soon. Spicer covered for the odd Kim love by saying that Trump only meant that he would like to meet Kim under the right circumstances, sometime in the far future after he has given up all his nukes and stopped threatening to annihilate his neighbors and our west coast.  During the same interview Trump rattled markets when he made an off the cuff remark about re-imposing Glass-Steagall regulations and breaking up the banks. Trump’s team is trying to figure out how to keep him on script before he provokes another international incident or causes a market meltdown.

More on Trumpcare:  On the home front,  Trump and the Republicans are making another push to get the current version of Trumpcare through Congress.  Trump threw a wrench into the process by insisting  that Trumpcare provides coverage for pre-existing conditions when it really doesn’t. Echoing Trump, Spicer insisted that the current version of Trumpcare includes coverage of preexisting conditions before adding that if it doesn’t it will when the Senate gets to it.  As of now Republicans are still a few votes short but they are aggressively twisting arms and plan to move forward the second that they feel they can punt the Trumpcare mess on to the Senate.

Lying With Numbers:  Even Economic Adviser Cohn and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin know that the tax reform plan relies on shaky math and unrealistic growth projections so they’ve come up with a strategy to grease passage through the Senate.  They hope to pass tax reform through “reconciliation” which requires fifty-one yes votes.  To qualify they would have to show that their plan wouldn’t increase the deficit over a ten year window because if projections show a deficit increase, sixty votes would be required for passage.  Leadership’s solution is to press for changes in voting rules in order to lengthen the projection window beyond ten years. Given the magnitude of the corporate cuts, they may have to push the window to infinity, or longer.